SANTA CLARA, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — December 11, 2013 —
Citrix today announced new customer deployments of the market-leading
Citrix XenDesktop® with HDX 3D Pro to deliver high-end 3D apps to
designers, engineers and workers all along the product design chain.
Citrix global customers, Knightec AB and Wiha Werkzeuge GmBH are using
XenDesktop to securely, centrally-deliver CAD applications to dispersed
design teams, with the stunning visual performance required for this
type of intensive design and engineering work. Since the introduction of
HDX 3D Pro graphics app acceleration technologies, Citrix has seen rapid
customer adoption led by organizations across North America, Europe and
Japan in heavy manufacturing, global engineering and energy sectors who
have deployed XenDesktop to host and securely-deliver design and
engineering applications from the datacenter.

“Supporting the CAD application market with our desktop and app
virtualization solutions represents a significant growth opportunity for
Citrix. Today, there are nearly 15 million CAD users1 that
design products and another 100 million users require access to design
data to view and edit these designs, representing a significant new
target user base for Citrix,” said Calvin Hsu, vice president of product
marketing, Desktop and Apps at Citrix.

In today’s global business environment, design and manufacturing
organizations require the ability to collaborate and manage design
lifecycles effectively with offshore, mobile and remote employees across
the globe. At the same time, they have to maintain tight security and
control over valuable intellectual property as the workforce becomes
more mobile and distributed. XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro is the only
solution that can support high-end designers, engineers and broad range
of employees working with 3D data, while delivering real-time, remote
collaboration. No other solution can offer the same performance, scale
and graphics compatibility. Competing solutions are architected such
that they cannot keep up with the latest versions of OpenGL, OpenCL,
CUDA and DirectX, which limits customers to certain applications and
legacy products. In addition, these solutions only offer one method of
GPU sharing, which does not leverage the full performance of GPU
virtualization designed by graphics market leader, NVIDIA. Professional
graphics applications such as CAD, visualization and analysis rely on
the parallel processing power of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to
visually render and manipulate large data models with pixel perfect
quality.

Global Organizations Virtualize CAD Apps

Knightec has a vision to become the Nordic region’s leading engineering
consulting firm in product and production development. The firm’s 350
engineers collaborate from throughout Sweden, combining technical skill
with business development expertise to create new solutions and increase
profitability for its customers. Knightec is delivering product design
projects faster and at a lower cost by empowering engineers to work and
collaborate from anywhere using Citrix technologies. Prior to deploying
XenDesktop, design data residing on local workstations was shared
between engineers via email and USB thumb drives. Traditional remote
access tools performed poorly with design apps, forcing users to make
simple design edits only in the office.

“We needed to provide our engineers with access to powerful workstations
with CAD abilities from anywhere in the world, without having to install
and support CAD applications over our network. We evaluated solutions
from VMware and Citrix. XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro was selected because
of its better performance with our design and simulation applications
and shared GPU roadmap with NVIDIA. Now engineers in any location can
use their virtual desktops to access CAD applications and collaborate
around project files. This also allows greater efficiency and
flexibility for the firm because we can easily assign people to
additional projects, working with different colleagues in many other
locations,” said Jörgen Norman, head of IT at Knightec.

Germany’s Wiha Premium Tools is one of the world’s leading manufacturers
of precision hand tools for use in industry and skilled trades. With
more than 850 employees that produce over 4,000 styles of precision
tools, the company has manufacturing facilities in Germany, Switzerland,
Poland and Vietnam to meet the demands of customers. In order to
collaborate and design across these multiple locations, Wiha uses
XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro technology to support remote locations
securely, while enabling mobile workstyles for CAD developers. Prior to
using XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro, users requiring high computing power
and rapid graphics performance were provided with high-performance
workstations running Siemens Solid Edge and other developer tools
running locally. Recently, a new challenge emerged with plans for a new
development site two hours away.

“The development of a completely independent environment would have
caused high costs and considerable administrative effort, and
synchronizing data regularly with the head office would have taxed the
network connection enormously,” Wiha IT Manager, Siegried Disch, said.

“Citrix technology opens many new options for us,” explained Disch. “For
example, we can recruit CAD construction specialists who live in a
different city or who want to work from their home office. Freelancers
and development sites abroad can also be connected simply and securely.
Wherever our users work, our invaluable know-how always remains secure
within our datacenter.”